Dreams and Memories

Your dreams, in the aspirational sense, are your hopes about the future. They guide your present actions towards a larger goal. Your memories are your links to the past and inform your decisions. Both elements contribute to who you are as a person.

In youth we have more dreams than memories. Then the memories accumulate with age. At some point, you may have more memories than dreams. Then you might be living in the past more than you are hopeful about the future.

It may be that having more dreams than memories is essential to maintaining a young spirit. Still, remember: past and present are in the mind only. You are now.

Popular Habits

There’s a lot on the internet about the habits of successful people. The more common ones are things like waking up early, meditating, taking cold showers, fasting, doing yoga or stretching, journaling and so on. Often they’re sold as magic pills in the pursuit of clicks and views. So many people are told do these things every day to be successful. And they are disappointed when they “don’t work” they quit.

I actually practice a lot of these habits on a regular basis. Most days I do wake up before 6am, take cold showers, stretch, yoga, exercise, meditate, journal, etc. I know none of these things make me succeed in anything outside the skills themselves. But there’s a reason they are so common among successful people: they are all ways to cope with the high amount of stress that complex lives and lifestyles demand. You don’t do these things to start that business. You end up doing these things because you’re running a business. In other words, these habits are often a consequence of success, not the cause of it.

The lives of top performers is always complicated, except perhaps in the field of Buddhism. Nothing about being at the top of something is easy. It may not be difficult in the way that construction work is difficult, but it is always demanding especially on the mind. And that’s what these popular habits help you manage. You start meditating when you realize you have so much work, you need to learn how to focus. You commit to the cold showers because it will wake you up fast and add 30 minutes to your morning. You begin exercising every day to combat the pain and degradation of the body that comes with daily office work, travel and stress. You wake up at 5:30am to fit all of it in.

I don’t mean to say that habits are useless unless you are successful. I think they can be useful to everybody depending on their personal circumstances. I’m passionate about my daily/weekly practices and a big proponent habit-building in general. They make significant contributions to my happiness, well-being and performance. But not everything is for everyone, and zero of my habits are responsible for any of my successes. It’s the other way around. The stress of my successes is responsible for my habits.

You stick with all of them because the discipline and structure they add to your life becomes necessary for managing yourself day-to-day. I can feel myself degrade whenever I don’t keep up my core habits for more than a couple of days, and the only way to remain balanced is to maintain discipline. And the thing is: all of these practices are difficult to maintain, by design. So if you don’t have an external driver to maintain them, it will be hard to keep up. My least favorite thing is waking up early in the morning. But I know that if I sleep in, I won’t have enough time to do my yoga, stretching and mobility routine in the morning. And if I don’t do that I know my body will be stiff and uncomfortable during the day, which will make it hard for me to relax. And if I’m not relaxed, it will take me longer to get through my to-do list, which means I’ll have to stay in the office until later, which means I’ll have to rush my training in the afternoon and then I won’t have any personal time in the evening – which will burn me out over time and get in the way of future success. So I just get up when the alarm rings and take a cold shower – problem solved.

Timelines

Time bends differently for different people. We don’t just perceive time differently from each other, we occupy entirely different timelines in parallel universes. You can’t substitute one for the other and you can’t compare, much less judge one over the other. Your universe is uniquely yours, this one is mine, you’re on your timeline and me on mine. Yours is no better than mine, and the reverse.

So much conflict comes down to mismatched timelines. Well, you won’t ever find matched timelines, maybe rather short intersections. But it’s there where we find conflict – when mine collides with yours, yours with the others, and so on and so forth and back.

Conflict may have nothing to do with how we experience time (I can’t experience yours, and vice versa) but rather how we perceive each other’s. Coordination may be more about matching perceptions of time rather than sharing space. It doesn’t help that perception of time is a rather unnatural thing for a human being.

Best and Perfect

Best and perfect are different. Best is not always perfect and vice versa.

(San Francisco)

Refinement

Refinement is the process of removing unnecessary elements from a thing. It’s often good. Refining silicon or aluminum is important to make mobile phones. It can also be bad. Coca or corn are innocuous until you refine them down to cocaine or high-fructose corn syrup. These are dangerous because once pure, they can be consumed in unnatural densities. You’d have to eat an impossible amount of coca leaves to get the same effect as a line of cocaine, let alone die from an overdose.

Ideas can be refined. Removing unnecessary elements from complex ideas is important for their distribution. But like coca leaves, ideas can be oversimplified to a dangerous degree. In the wrong refinery, the complexities of globalization can be refined all the way down to “immigrants are bad”, “we must leave the EU”, and so on. Removing the complexities from ideas can lead to gross misrepresentations. At the same time, it’s hard for ideas to scale without making them easy to consume.

Counterbalance

Physical yoga teaches you to be stable in any position by activating the antagonist parts of your body (e.g. you can’t make a stable wheel without also activating your front). Once out of a position you counterbalance again with its antagonist pose (out of the wheel, into a forward bend). Every position has an equal and opposite counterposition. Balance requires both. And consistent balance is created – not found. You create balance with active counterbalance. This is true in the body, and elsewhere in life.

Catch and Reward

To change your behavior, learn to catch and reward yourself.

Catching yourself means noticing instances of the behavior you want to change. Some things, like emotions, come from deep in your subconscious and are difficult to spot. It can take a long while after the fact to get there (hours, days, years). Journaling or other forms of structured self-reflection help. Other things, like desires, can be easier to notice on the spot. But either way, catching yourself is a skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the closer you get to catching yourself in “the moment”. And eventually, you’ll be able to unconsciously catch yourself before the moment. Then you can change your behavior.

Rewarding yourself is what you do after the catch. Congratulate yourself internally for having caught the behavior in the first place, even if you wound up doing the thing you were trying to avoid. Literally say, in your head but ideally out loud, “good job”, “nice catch”, laugh at your silly self. Be kind, feel grateful for noticing, and you’ll catch yourself sooner next time.

This can be difficult because your first instinct will often be to criticize yourself for behaving negatively. But this creates more negative emotions. And to make something better, first, you have to stop making it worse. But rewarding yourself for having caught the behavior – even long after the fact – will condition your brain to seek the reward by getting better at the catching part. So rewarding yourself is key to learning how to catch yourself.

This works well for behaviors born out of emotions like anger, jealousy, envy, or fear.

(New York)

Opinion

An opinion is a view, not a reality. It’s possible to have different opinions about the same thing. Reality is rigid but opinions are choice. Many emotions are the result of opinion over reality. So you can negotiate your emotions simply by changing your opinion. It is also possible (and often desirable) to have no opinion about a thing, and thus no reaction.

Narrow the scope of your opinions; wait before having them.

Don’t Push

Turn off all notifications. Slowly turn back on the ones you miss. After a few weeks you’ll only get those from the people you most love and the (few!) services you regularly need. New information can no longer be “pushed” to you; you decide when to pull it.

You will be much slower to respond to everything else. At times this will frustrate those used to the status quo of entering each other’s consciousness at-will by simple finger-tapping. But you have the right not to be pushed.

(Osaka)

Time and Money

You can spend time making money, and you can spend money buying time. So you can use money to buy some time to spend making more money, and repeat. The more money you have, the more time you can spend to make more money. In some ways this contributes to wealth concentration by creating leverage on time.

But still money doesn’t make time. So there’s a limit to how much it’s worth spending time making money versus elsewhere. Time is the real store of value. Maybe the wealth redistribution conversation should include distribution of time.

(Osaka)

Discomfort

Taking dead cold showers every morning will make you happier. Your body will make dynorphins, which make you feel uncomfortable. But inresponse to that it will also create new opioid receptors, which makes you sensitive to the next batch of endorphins, wherever they come from. The repeated act of choosing and resisting discomfort also increases your resistance to physiological stress. So taking cold showers every morning makes you (1) more receptive to good sensations, and (2) more resistant to negative ones. 

Same rules for life. Pain is useful because it increases your sensitivity to pleasure and your ability to deal with subsequent pain. Both are important for a happy and fulfilled life.

(Osaka)

Timing

The wise know timing is everything in life. Timing changes the nature of things. Good timing can make the best of anything and bad timing can ruin anything. Time itself is a constant, but timing is part of an act. You can’t control time, but you can influence timing. Waiting well is one way to do it.

Good judgement is also about timing. Some good things seem bad in the moment, just as other good things may reveal themselves to be bad later. So it’s good to wait and judge things at the right time. Or not judge at all.

(This one in Beijing)

Waiting

Waiting is hard because it feels like doing nothing when you should be doing something. But it’s easier to do when you consider it an action rather than inaction. Choosing to wait is doing something. So you can let go of the anxiety that you’re doing nothing. 

Still, active waiting is hard. Like conscious breathing, it’s a difficult but universally useful skill. But because it is a skill, it can be developed and eventually mastered.

The first thing to learn when to wait. The answer is always. Waiting should precede every action. You can train this by actively waiting before small actions. A good exercise is to add a deep breath before every step in a routine process, like making coffee or preparing for bed.

The second thing to learn is how long to wait. This is hard because the answer can be a second or a decade. You can wait too little, and you can wait too long. This one comes with experience and I don’t have enough to teach it. But it starts with learning when to wait.

(New York)